SF Public Defender Pushes to Decertify 3 Police Officers Whose Arrest Left Man in Coma
The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office is seeking to decertify three San Francisco Police officers, alleging they so brutally injured a man that he had to be medically induced into a coma.
During a press conference at the public defender’s office on Thursday, attorneys presented body camera footage from Aug. 17, 2025, in which San Francisco police officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway and Gabriel Rivera tackled 33-year-old Kevon Gibson to the ground.
They repeatedly punched him in the head, pulled his hair, and kneeled on his neck in the hallway of a residential hotel on Sixth Street.
“I’m scared right now,” Gibson told the officers as they laid on top of him and struck him.
Gibson repeatedly told the officers, “I can’t breathe,” words which Public Defender Mano Raju said were also the last by Eric Garner, who was killed in New York police custody in 2014. One officer also knelt on Gibson’s neck, the way George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020.
Gibson was treated in the ICU, put into a medically induced coma and intubated, before being held at the San Francisco County Jail for a year — awaiting trial for three felony counts of resisting arrest.
Deputy public defenders Bonnie Chan-Silen and John Paul Passaglia represented Gibson in the case, where a San Francisco jury acquitted him of all three charges.
Although Gibson was acquitted of the three felony counts, the jury still convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm and three misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest.
Gibson was sentenced last month. He was given credit for the year he served in jail, and the judge allowed him to serve the remaining 17 days of his sentence in home detention, at the residence of a loved one.
Chan-Silen said the DA’s office attempted to keep the jury from hearing audio from the body camera, but the jury heard his cries for help.
“What makes this horrific police beating even more egregious is the way the district attorney’s office tried to cover it up, and charge Mr. Gibson with crimes that he did not commit,” Chan-Silen said.
In a statement, the district attorney’s office said it never asked the court to exclude the footage.
“The jury convicted Mr. Gibson of four crimes. Calling this a ‘cover-up’ isn’t just an attack on our prosecutors—it shows remarkable disrespect for the court and the jurors who heard the evidence and rendered the verdict,” the statement said.
Passaglia alleged the officers were caught in three lies at trial: One said Gibson bit him and another said Gibson punched him in the face multiple times, and even took his radio off and wrapped the cord around his neck. The third claim was that Gibson attempted to break his thumb.
“The jury knew these were lies because they were shown a volume of various videos that collectively showed unequivocally that not one of those incidents happened,” Passaglia said.
Following Gibson’s conviction, the DA’s office issued a press release on Aug. 19 that described the sequence of events: “When officers attempted a pat search for weapons, Mr. Gibson started to actively resist their attempts and fight with officers. Eventually three officers were able to restrain Mr. Gibson and handcuff him.”
That statement also thanked the officers and the jury.
“She [Brooke Jenkins] omitted any mention of the fact that they had brutally beaten Mr. Gibson nearly into a coma,” Chan-Silen said. “She villainized Mr. Gibson as a Black man with a gun.”
Police were called to the residential hotel and spoke with a neighbor who complained about Gibson, calling him the [N-word] and threatening to “stick this knife into his Black ass” and “slice and watch him bleed everywhere.” Police did not further investigate the man’s threats to Gibson.
Chan-Silen said Gibson only briefly possessed a handgun for protection against that “racist” neighbor.
Caraway, Conway and Rivera attempted to locate Gibson at his friend’s apartment, loudly kicking on the door and telling the occupants that they could break the door in with no repercussions.
“Ain’t nobody gonna do shit if I kick this door down, right?” One of the officers said.
The officers found Gibson as he was coming out of an elevator. They told him he wasn’t under arrest, but immediately put their hands on him in an attempt to detain him. All three officers had contact with Gibson, and all four men were soon on the ground. Besides body cameras, the scuffle was captured by a surveillance camera in the hallway.
At the end, there was a noticeable amount of blood coming from Gibson’s forehead.
The public defender’s office said it wasn’t aware of whether the officers had been reprimanded, but believed one of them was promoted shortly after the incident. SFPD has not yet responded to a request for comment.
The public defender said it plans to file a complaint with the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability, and notify the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST, to seek decertification of the officers.
“Prosecutors often charge and overcharge our clients with resisting arrest as leverage to punish our clients and then excuse the police officers’ actions, and then misrepresent the true nature of these incidents,” Raju said. “All of this is a disservice to our clients, a disservice to the community, and a disservice to the pursuit of justice itself.”